The Austrian teenager imprisoned for eight years described in a TV interview the horror of being locked into her dark underground cell for the first time.

"I was distraught and very angry," Natascha Kampusch, now 18, said in her first Austrian TV interview since her escape on August 23.

Early in her captivity, Kampusch said she threw water bottles at the wall in frustration and despair and would have gone crazy if kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil had not occasionally allowed her upstairs six months after she was snatched off the street as a freckle-faced 10-year-old.

She felt claustrophobic in the small space and the wheezing of a ventilator that pumped air into her cell was unbearable Kampusch said in the 40 minute interview shown last night.